Competition, in this globalization era, requires human resources who master knowledge, with complex thinking skills, critical thinking skills, problem-solving, creativity, and metacognition. The development of critical thinking skills can involve students' interaction with the environment. This study aims to describe the critical thinking skills of high school students through the development of popular scientific books that have been developed. This research is development research that refers to educational design research (EDR) with the stages of preliminary research, prototyping phase, and assessment phase. The research took place in September 2018 to June 2019 at SMAN 2 Muara, Barito Utara Regency. Critical thinking skills data were obtained at the small group and field test stages by calculating the percentage of students' worksheet answers in popular scientific books, quantitative descriptive data analysis. The results showed students' critical thinking skills the indicators of interpretation, assumptions, deductions, and inferences reach very good categories.